Your Right to Know

By Jeremy W. PetersTHE NEW YORK TIMES • Tuesday December 11, 2012 7:20 AM

WASHINGTON — As a fundraiser for a local college scholarship program, Rick Nolan understands how
much it costs to send children in northern Minnesota to technical school. Having run a sawmill, he
can speak like a logger.

“I know what you can get for 1,000 board feet of lumber,” he said recently. “I know what you
have to pay for stumpage.”

But there is another piece of Nolan’s biography that, until recently, few voters wanted to hear
about and few politicians would dare own up to: the three terms he spent in Congress 30 years
ago.

In fact, his success in Washington became one of his most-marketable traits when he decided to
make another run for office this year.

“It’s time to get something done,” Nolan declared in one of his ads.

He beat his opponent, who was elected in the tea party upheaval of 2010, by 9 points. And when
he takes his seat as one of 84 new members of the House of Representatives (49 Democrats, 35
Republicans) in January, Nolan, D-Minn., will be one of the many who were elected despite their
history in politics and government.

The 2010 election, with its throw-the-bums-out, anti-government furor, swept into office a host
of people who had no government experience. There were an exterminator, a dentist, a youth minister
and a pizza man. But this year, voters sent many of those people packing.

In their place will be a class of career bureaucrats and policy wonks who, after two years of
intransigence and dysfunction on Capitol Hill, make up what could be characterized as the
anti-antigovernment wave.

These members, many of whom ran on a promise to break the seemingly endless impasse in
Washington, will face their first test early. The new Congress almost certainly will inherit
complicated tasks such as raising the nation’s borrowing limit, revamping the tax code and making
adjustments to social welfare programs, issues that are not expected to be entirely resolved as
part of the negotiations to head off the automatic tax increases and spending cuts set to take
effect on Jan. 1.

The new House will include nine people, like Nolan, who have been in Congress before. It also
will include a former congressional chief of staff, a decade-long member of a local water board, an
assistant secretary for veterans affairs and even a Kennedy.

In some cases, voters opted for nonpoliticians, albeit ones who sold themselves as more capable
of handling the country’s problems.

In Florida, voters rejected Allen B. West, a retired Army colonel who became one of the
most-visible faces of the tea party movement. His replacement, Patrick Murphy, is a former
accountant for Deloitte & Touche.

“The substance, I think, prevailed over the rhetoric,” Murphy said. “Having a financial and
accounting background, I know how to look for waste, inefficiencies and fraud.”

Another new member is Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs in Iraq when her Black Hawk helicopter
was shot down. Duckworth first ran for Congress in northeastern Illinois in 2006 to fill the seat
held for more than 30 years by Henry J. Hyde. She lost but was tapped later that year to lead the
state’s Veterans Affairs Department. In 2009, President Barack Obama nominated her as assistant
secretary of veterans affairs.

Then late one night in April 2011 when she was at her desk, she decided to run for Congress
again. A budget stalemate had nearly brought the federal government to a halt, and Duckworth said
she was fuming.

“I was sitting in my office at five minutes to midnight waiting for government to shut down,”
she recalled, “and there was my congressman boasting about how he had brought Washington to a
standstill. That’s when I thought, ‘We’ve got to stop this.’ ”

She beat her opponent, Joe Walsh, a Republican who had never held elected office, by 9 points, a
margin no doubt cushioned by district lines redrawn in Democrats’ favor.